Seaside. Nowhere near the sea. A small town in the 17th century where allegations of witchcraft are regularly punished by torture, confession and stoning and the local Constable is an ineffectual ninny.
However all that is forgotten at the town’s palace of entertainment to which local celebrity Mr. Punch (Damon Herriman, also in The Nightingale, out next week) and his wife Judy (Mia Wasikowska) have returned with their popular puppet show featuring his puppet as a gleeful wife-beater and hers as his spouse, dutifully trying to protect their baby.
In the daytime, Punch is perfectly happy to be he who casts the first stone at an official stoning of paraded, accused, so-called witches while his missus is rather less enthusiastic. She has been trying, none to successfully, to wean him off the evils of drink, but the competition in the form of local woman of ill repute Polly (Lucy Velik) tempting him down the local boozer is proving too much for him to resist.
Home life is difficult: he hates their loyal but ageing caretaker couple and is so useless at looking after their baby girl that at one point the infant almost crawls into a blazing hearth fire.
When family circumstances worsen, Judy leaves Punch and falls in with a mainly female group of dissenters camping out in the woods. This Judy may have been thrashed within an inch of her life by her soused husband, but she’s had enough and is now working out how to fight back.
This is impossible to accurately synopsise without spoilers (hopefully I’ve given nothing away). It’s also filled with riotous detail – pub brawls, public hangings and stonings, official Ruffians who practice their violent law enforcement work whether the Constable agrees with their methods or not.
For generations of Brits, Punch and Judy as performed by a seaside puppeteer in a small vertical tent are indelible archetypes from childhood, along with the baby, the policeman, the dog, the string of sausages and the crocodile. Aussie director Mirrah Foulkes completely understands these figures, skilfully exploiting them to very specific narrative ends. She conjures a terrifying fantasy land where freedom confronts bigotry even as everyday folk marvel at the magic world brought to life by theatrical puppeteers.
As such, this plugs right into some powerful myths buried very deep in the British psyche then plays around with them to great effect. For anyone who grew up with the terrifying Mr. Punch, his much put upon wife and child and all the rest, this is essential viewing. And coming a week ahead of likewise impressive The Nightingale, it suggests there may be something of a wave of Australian fantastique at the moment.
Judy & Punch is out in the UK on Friday, November 22nd. On VoD in March.
Over fifty years old, Goryeojang is sadly available as only a print with two reels (three and six) missing. The LKFF screened the version where the missing scenes are explained by a brief series of intertitles so that the rest of the film can make sense. It’s a tough film to pigeonhole. A description like period drama, which genre it absolutely fits, proves woefully inadequate as a description. To a Western viewer, it plays out like a classic fairy tale with archetypal characters and considerable amounts of cruelty. The art direction is light years away from any sort of social realism with its rural sets obviously artificially constructed in a studio, recalling (to name but one obvious example) The Singing Ringing Tree (Francesco Stefani, 1957).
The concept of Goryeojang – taking your elders up a mountain when they reach 70 so that they can face death – is central to the world conjured here and all the characters accept the idea as part of their fate. This idea introduced in an opening, present day, TV discussion programme which is never referred to again in the film (perhaps the payoff came in one of the missing reels). Everything else takes place in Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty (918-1392). Keum (Ju Jeung-ryu) has remained in the village past her 70th birthday not out of some desire for self-preservation and longevity which we in the materialist West would recognise, but rather because her adult son Gu-ryong (Kim Jin-kyu) isn’t yet married and she wants to make sure that happens for him before she goes away to die.
Throughout the narrative a lady shaman loiters around the village’s sacred tree enacting strange songs and rituals to ensure local life proceeds according to tradition as it should. Early on, she prophesies to young mum Keum that the latter’s son will eventually kill the ten sons of the man Keum plans to marry, a prophecy which will overshadow everything that follows.
While her new husband in question is kind enough to her young son Gu-ryong, the former’s ten sons prove considerably less charitable and set the boy up in a game of blind man’s bluff wherein, while the boy is blindfolded, they place a venomous snake in his path which bites his leg when he unwittingly walks into it. This leaves the boy crippled.
Twenty years later as an adult, the boy has become socially ostracised as no able-bodied woman will marry him. He’s also done rather well for himself causing considerable enmity between him and his ten stepbrothers. When Gu-ryong eventually marries a mute, they kidnap and gang rape her, leaving him on his own again. Later, he adopts a young girl with a pockmarked face Ye-on, another outcast who like Gu-ryong didn’t fit in with their former cruel siblings.
With the area in the grip of hunger caused by drought, the lady shaman insists that Gu-ryong must take Keum up the mountain and leave her there to appease the gods who will then send the much-needed rain.
Sequences such as the blind man’s buff/snake episode, the gang-rape of the mute and, most particularly, the late scene at the mountain top where Gu-ryong must abandon the aged Keum to her fate lodge in the memory of the viewer. The latter sequence delivers a place littered with human skulls and bones across which Gu-ryong traverses back and forth as he tries to leave but his mum keeps finding last words to say or suggestions to make before he leaves her forever. Director Kim milks this for all it’s worth, yet the performances are so heartfelt and the material so disturbing that it really gets under your skin. Most of Kim’s films are set in the present day, so the period historical nature of this one is something of an exception. The sex, violence and cruelty of the narrative is, however, in keeping with many of his other films, as is the almost fairy tale like quality.
Goryeojang is sometimes also known as Burying The Old Alive.
Ieoh Island (1987) Director: Kim Ki-young, Tuesday, 12 November⋅18:15 ICA, book here.
Goryeojang plays in LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival. Watch the film trailer below:
A US Blu-ray of Goryeojang is released by the Korean Film Archive on November 14th. Available here.
A doctor (Ramzy Bedia) in an unnamed French-speaking Mediterranean country finds himself caught in the grip of endless violence in Terminal South, a meandering drama about trying to maintain dignity in a world gone wrong. Despite boasting solid performances, handsome cinematography and moments of sheer viciousness, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s sixth film has little to say and even less to say it with.
The opening sequence quickly shows what kind of country we’re in; a bus trip through the mountains raided by men in army uniforms who take everyone’s most precious belongings. Moments of bloodshed spark out of nowhere, any encounter containing the ability to erupt into a skirmish. When the bus driver reports the theft to a local newspaper, he cannot identify the men, unsure if they’re actually the army or simply bandits dressed up in their uniform. The chief editor agrees that it’s important, and promises to publish the story the next day. But when he goes to the office the next morning, a car pulls up and he is shot dead.
The shocking death of the doctor’s is treated as a watershed moment here, the traditional Islamic funeral given ten plus minutes to really soak in his tragic fate. Yet this is a guy we have only met a couple of times; making it difficult to really care that he’s gone. Making scenes like this longer than they need to be often achieves the opposite effect of what a filmmaker intended; causing me to lose interest just when my emotional investment should be growing.
Meanwhile, the doctor’s fate is a miserable one, caught up in a Kafkesque world where the line between police, terrorists and militia men has collapsed. There are no real good guys here, no epic signs of resistance, just ordinary men and women trying to do their best. Even he is sent death threats and told to stop his work, treating patients whose ailments have been exacerbated by living in such a society. But the doctor’s story randomly piles on the misery, giving Bedia little to work with dramatically. The predominately comic actor pulls in a decent shift here, yet he cannot overcome a fundamentally weak screenplay without any true central conflict to speak of.
There is a difference between being ambiguous and being vague. While ambiguity invites the viewer to search for different meanings, vagueness can often leave us scratching our heads. We never even find out where the film is set. Are we in the south of France or are we in North Africa? I assume this is the point, to display how any country has the capacity to steadily disintegrate. Yet without any real context, I found it hard to find a foothold in the story, its tale completely washing over me like the Mediterranean Sea.
A French Release date has been set for 13 November. Whether the film is released anywhere else remains to be seen.
While it takes place in consistently bright sunshine near a Turkish habour town, there’s nothing pleasant about the family dynamics portrayed here. Although Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) arrives at a Turkish airport wearing summer clothing and lugging a case at the start, the narrative wouldn’t do too well in the Bechdel Test as all her dealings with the world appear to involve men and revolve around sex and/or violence – real, implied or refused. Pretty quickly she’s in a parked white car with Bobby (Yuval Segal) and explaining to him that she’s €300 short. He complains that “pretty girls think everything is for free” and gives her a pretty unpleasant warning on behalf of the boss to ensure she’ll never make another mistake like that. Her one and only warning which is never discussed again.
Later Sascha is picked up by boyfriend Michael (Lai Yde) and his number two Bo (Bo Brønnum) in the same white car. They drive to the villa where the rest of the ‘family’ are waiting. Swimming Pool. Drink. Drugs. A couple of other women, one of whom Tanje (Laura Kjær) looks as young as Sascha. There’s clearly money to burn and Michael has put some of it into the tacky hotel where Sascha stayed overnight after her flight.
Male hijinks and larking about quickly give way to something darker. Take the loyal Musse (Adam Ild Rohweder) who barks when playfully called a dog. At one point he puts a foot wrong: he comes back to the villa after someone hasn’t shown up. Michael is concerned that Musse may have lead the police there. They take him from outside into a downstairs room while Sasha, Tanje and a child are sent to watch TV in the lounge. The three turn up the volume to hide the sounds of whatever’s going on in the other room. Later bearing flesh wounds he hands out presents to Michael, Bo and others. Michael tells him everything is okay and gives his an envelope of cash. His philosophy is to punish bad and reward good.
How this works out for the women in this group is much more sexual. Sascha is abused in some pretty unpleasant and explicit ways by Michael, which immediately earn the film a BBFC 18 certificate (and the same for its trailer below, although the material in the film itself is considerably stronger and far more unpleasant than what’s shown in the 18 trailer).
Not all characters here are as nasty. Dutch yachtsmen Tomas (Thijs Römer) is an easy going type who, it later emerges, has given up the cutthroat world of sales and marketing for a life sailing round the world with his pal Karsten (Stanislav Sevcik). Sascha meets the pair in an ice cream parlour queue and later takes Ecstasy with Tomas on the local beach. He’s a nice guy who is later going to wish he hadn’t come anywhere near Sascha.
Holiday consistently looks good with Turkish sun burning into every bright blue skied, daytime frame and the night time environment appearing just as idyllic. No-one can accuse the cast of not trying really hard.
Eklöf previously had a screenplay credit on Border/Gräns (Ali Abbasi, 2018) but her feature directorial debut is nowhere near as complex or skilfully orchestrated as either that, Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018) or Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler, 2018). Both these latter films contain an element of misogyny. Yet while the female-written and -directed Holiday’s intention to express the voices of women placed in positions of submission might be admirable, this backfires in the finished film by failing to offer any way out of a misogynistic cycle of violence in which women are abused by men. A few unsettling scenes and shocks, not least in the closing 10 or so minutes where the piece veers off in one or two unexpected directions, aren’t really enough to lift the whole above that. Perhaps Eklöf should take a lesson from Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2018) which at least attempted to turn the tables.
Holiday is out in the UK on Friday, August 2nd. On VoD on Monday, August 26th.
People often speak of the “pursuit of happiness”, but what about catharsis? That feeling of relief that washes over you may bring some of life’s greatest satisfaction, even if it is comparatively fleeting. This is because the release of catharsis is often preceded by intense, repressed anguish that has built and built and built. The films in this short list are of different tones and contexts, but they all contain moments of cathartic violence, moments where force is used, for better or worse, to darkly satisfying ends. The films are listed chronologically
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1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975):
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a quintessential example of the term ‘required viewing’. Most would corroborate this by saying it’s a classic of the New Hollywood period, features Jack Nicholson’s finest performance, and is one of only three films to win the five major Academy Awards.
All valid reasons, granted – but none are the reason. The real reason One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is ‘required viewing’ is its ability to reveal the nature of your nearest and dearest; for if a friend, relative or significant other does not loathe Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) within the first half hour, you need to reconsider the relationship.
Ratched exemplified the term ‘resting bitch face’ some 45 years before its coinage, yet that term actually does her a disservice for Ratched’s malice never ‘rests’. She is a petty tyrant to her core with no ability or inclination to help her patients. Rather, she delights in getting under their skin with her hateful passive aggression and, when that doesn’t work, outright bullying.
Her despicable compulsion to control hits fever pitch when she catches Billy – a stuttering, nervous wreck who’s a threat to precisely no one – in bed with a girl who McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) playfully smuggles into the hospital. When Ratched threatens to tell Billy’s equally tyrannical mother, he commits suicide.
It is a sickening moment. As she wrestles past the distraught crowd to reach his fresh corpse demanding that they “Let me through! Let me through!” I defy anyone not to be overcome with a dangerous kind of anger. McMurphy certainly sees the red mist as he throws her to the ground by her neck, putting every pound of body weight into the grip around her trachea.
Now strangling a woman doesn’t tend to be a good look but the toxic, fleeting catharsis of this moment is almost impossible to deny. Your allegiance will lie with McMurphy. Nicholson’s performance is charged with a palpable anger that mirrors your own and you just can’t help but shift in your seat, willing him to do some serious damage.
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2. Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975):
We all know the scene – Hooper’s missing, Quint’s dead and the Orca is sinking. All Chief Brody has to defend himself with is an M1 Garand, harpoon and scuba diving tank, which he desperately throws in the shark’s mouth as the cabin floods with water.
What follows is one of the most electrifying climaxes in cinema history and a deft creative decision by Spielberg. In the novel, the shark succumbs to several harpoon wounds as it lurches towards Brody in open water, but this was not the ‘big rousing ending’ that Spielberg envisaged. Author Peter Benchley resisted this change initially but the final cut persuaded him, which was so explosively ‘rousing’ that it had audiences whooping and cheering.
It’s doubtful whether contemporary audiences would share this reaction, but there is no denying the scene’s immense sense of release. And End Titles, the blissful final piece of John Williams’s iconic score, is the pure sonofication of catharsis.
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3. Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978):
The cathartic act of violence in Midnight Express is a sweet reversal of fortune. In fact, the final confrontation between Billy Hayes (Brad Davis) and the bestial prison warden Hamidou (Paul L. Smith) is the sweetest revenge of any film on this list.
Hayes, sentenced to 30 years in a Turkish prison for smuggling hashish, leads a sub-human existence by the film’s end. He has been beaten and raped to the point of psychosis and despite the promise made by its title (Midnight Express is prison slang for escape), Hayes’ situation seems utterly hopeless.
So when Hayes is faced with yet another episode of sexual violence at the hands of Hamidou, he musters all the strength he has left to throw his gaunt, battered body into the guard’s immense bulk, causing him to impale the nape of his neck on a coat hanger. It is a jaw dropping moment and the massively welcomed demise of an underrated villain.
Midnight Express is also pictured at the top of this article!
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4. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992):
Tarantino has become so noted for his cine-literate style, loquacious dialogue and extravagant bloodshed that one can forget just how nasty his debut really is. Now Reservoir Dogs makes an impression with its style and dialogue, too, but the violence is not ‘extravagant’ – it’s the most callous, painful and sadistic of Tarantino’s career.
After all, this is a film where the focal character – Mr. Orange (Tim Roth) – spends 90 minutes bleeding to death from a bullet to the gut. Despite his terrible injury, however, he finds the strength to bring catharsis and relief to a moment where Tarantino seems set on pushing Mr. Blonde’s (Michael Madsen) cruelty to an intolerable extreme.
After severing the police officer’s ear and dousing him with petrol, this sadistic crescendo appears to heading for a monstrous climax. Yet just as Mr. Blonde flicks his Zippo, he his hit by a volley of fire from Mr. Orange’s handgun, killing the abject psychopath several times over. It provides a sigh of relief after seven and a half minutes of masterfully unpleasant filmmaking – a mixture of diegetic sound, fluid camera movement, and fine performances from Michael Madsen and Kirk Baltz.
Well, that notion doesn’t apply here, not even slightly. Indeed, Eastwood was rather milquetoast back in 1992 because sometimes you’ve just got to kick ass – a lot of it – without a moment’s reflection. This is something that John Rambo understands in Rambo, by far the most violent instalment in the series.
Of course, the plot is utterly incidental. In fact, its mayhem has a context rather than a plot, and that context is the military dictatorship of Burma, in which Rambo naturally becomes mired once a group of missionaries are abducted by Major Pa Tee Tint and his army, who commit several massacres that are genuinely graphic and nasty.
The catharsis comes in the film’s climax, when the missionaries and mercenaries sent to save them are moments from death by firing squad. Just as the troops assume their positions, Rambo rises behind a grunt manning a Jeep-mounted M2 Machine Gun, cutting his head off with one heavy swoop of his machete. He then commanders the weapon and directs a burst of .50 cal fire into the driver’s head, turning him into pulpy splat.
With the weapon’s guard covered in gore and his mouth slanted with fury, Rambo proceeds to batter the army below with relentless gunfire – popping heads, blowing holes and breaking all kinds of bones. The violence is so high-impact – so very lumpy – that it satisfies whatever warped bloodlust the viewer may (probably) have.
